SEGMENT JORUNE This month we present campaign by Geoff Gray, on “Bringing your Players
“To Rescue and we expand to Jonme.”
a Scarmis,” our series
a miniof articles
In the last issue of White Wolf, we helped land your players on Jorune. Whether you get them here by starship or by warp, just bait that hook and pull them in! Jorune can serve as an excellent excursion or as a permanent setting for your campaigns. This issue describes the characteristics used to describe your characters on Jorune.
CHARACTERISTICS
OF CREATURES
Characteristics for players on Jorune aren’t as important as they are in other games. This is due mainly to the emphasis on people and situations rather than hack-and-slash. Because Jorune doesn’t use experience points and treasure isn’t the primary goal, players will find that their destiny has much more to do with their skill at playing than in beating the dice. Power is one of the most common character goals in roleplaying games, but most systems pay only lip-service to it. If power is measured by the number of weapons, troops, and military fortifications the player holds, the greatest reward of role-playing can be had by a first-time gamer in forty minutes time. On Jonme, real power lies with technology and information and the means to use it. Whereas some cretin with a tank may be the toughest guy around on some other world, on Jorune, the person who holds the maps of ocean warps holds the real power. The role-playing system used in SkyRealms of Jorune is based upon these characteristics: Constitution, Social, Color, Strength, Education, Isho, Speed, Agility, Aim, Spot, Listen, and Learn. All but the last three characteristics are simple 3D6 rolls, but Spot, Listen, and Learn are generated by lD6+7. No
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characteristic may ever drop below 3 or be higher than 18. Characteristics are treated as aptitudes, not levels of accomplishment. For instance, Agility is the character’s basic level of agility and the rate at which new physical skills can be learned, not the actual level of accomplishment with learned skills. Dice are rolled against characteristics to determine success or failure for the character in tasks related to the characteristic. For instance, to see if a character is able to get out of the way of a falling thombo (an enormous two-legged beast of burden depicted in last month’s Segment Jorune), a roll of 3D6 would be made against the character’s Agility. Rolling at or below the characteristic indicates success. Failing this roll indicates a smushed player. For example, if Mike Smith is playing Jorune for the first time, and his character, “Bill the Unmerciful Butcher of the Lower Dungeon,” has an Agility of 8, and a thombo trips and falls off a ledge 300 feet above his unsuspecting head, the sholari (Jorune referee) would interrupt Mike from his liquid pizza drink to ask him to make 3D6 rolls against his Spot and his Listen characteristics. If he succeeds on either of these rolls then the character may make a roll against Agility to see if he can get out of the way. Not all referees would be as generous, but there is a chance that as the thombo descends at great speed that it might either (1) alert Bill by blocking the sunlight from his slovenly and massive form, or (2) create a piercing cry as the creature plummets downward. Mike’s Spot characteristic is 12, but he rolls a 13 on his Spot roll and so he doesn’t see the behemoth descend. Next, Mike rolls 3D6 against his Listen roll. Surely he will hear the death cry of this two-ton bag of drumsticks. His Listen characteristic is a 9 and a 9 is rolled --- this blaster-totin’ money-gropin’ player character is alerted to the thombo’s stealthful approach and takes action. Too late. Mike’s Agility is 8 and an 18 was rolled. Bill the Unmerciful Butcher of the Lower Dungeon has become a permanent fixture of Jorune, a piece of residual waste from the Hall of Drenn, a composite glob of thombo and human watermelon.
Shantha
Thriddle
Scarnzis